The Best of Everything (40 page)

"They say people outgrow each other," Barbara said. "That was a bitchy thing to say, wasn't it! If anyone had said that to my husband while I was married to him and I knew about it . . ."

"It wasn't bitchy. I know how you meant it. Look, Barbara, you can say something in malice and it means one thing, and you can say it because you're a sympathetic thinking human being and it means quite another."

"You keep giving me credit," she murmured.

"Why? Do you picture yourself the homewrecker? Do you think this is a very dramatic situation?" His smile took the edge oflF his words. He could smile at me that way, she thought, and call me anything he wanted and I think I'd take it.

"I can't say I'm not sorry you're married," she admitted.

"There are a lot of other things wrong with me," he said, smiling. "Just pretend the main obstacle to our romance is that I'm too old— which is to be considered, by the way—and you'll feel better."

"I know . . . it's silly. I go out with lots of boys I know I could never marry, but that's because I don't want them or they don't want me. But when I know that even if you and I for some utterly cra2y reason decided to fall in love I couldn't have you, then it scares me."

"Trust me. You won't fall in love with me."

"That's a dangerous thing to say to a girl," Barbara said lightly.

"Why?"

"I don't know. It just makes the wheels start to whir. The only thing more dangerous is to say, 7 won't ever fall in love with you.'"

He didn't answer for a while. "Then I won't say it," he said finally. "But not for that reason."

"There's one thing I know," Barbara said. "Married men don't divorce their wives for other women. They divorce their wives because they don't want to be with the wives any more. I'm not talking about old fools or lechers or neurotics, I mean the kind of mar-

ried man a girl like me might fall for. A man like you. I'm right, aren't I?"

"Yes."

"Well. Now that we've got that settled, let's change the subject."

He looked at her carefully. "You are extraordinary."

"No, you are."

"I?"

"Because you're so honest," Barbara said.

There was nothing more to be said for a moment and they sat together, shoulders touching, finishing their brandy. He was no longer holding her hand, and the pressure of his shoulder against hers was very light, a mere transmission of body heat, but Barbara was extremely aware of him. She should feel sad, she should feel fated for disappointment and perhaps worse, but she felt only contentment. She liked him so much, she was so fond of him, that merely sitting next to him without words made her feel as though she could face anything: the garter snappers, the boys who "only wanted to neck" with her, the search for someone compatible whom she could love. She knew that, after their long separation, she again was dangerously close to being in love with Sidney Carter, but this time it was not a childish crush and she felt she could handle it. To fall desperately in love with him, to spoil this warmth she felt and turn it into the cold chills of an emotional problem, would be idiocy. She had been forewarned. But she knew that, despite their best intentions, people reached a point beyond which they could not return but could only hope for a safe landing.

He paid the check and they walked slowly out of the bar and through the hotel lobby. Sidney stopped at the newsstand and bought a copy of each of the morning newspapers for himself and one of each for her. "I'll never have time to read them all," Barbara said. "Do you, before you go to sleep?"

"Every night."

"I'm glad I'm not an executive!"

He laughed. "It's a train habit. You have to do something when you commute, and I don't play cards. Now that I'm not commuting for the summer I can't seem to get out of the habit so I read the papers in my room."

"You're ... in the city?"

"I'm staying at a hotel. It's only four nights a week, and I hate going up to that old bam alone."

Why did it frighten her a little to learn that he was staying by himself so near by? Was it because she expected him to lure her upstairs and seduce her? Or because she wanted him to? I'm a veteran of attempted seductions, Barbara told herself, and I haven't been trapped yet. It's up to the girl. "It's pretty late," she said. "I'd better go home now."

"That's where I'm taking you."

When the taxi arrived in front of her apartment, Sidney got out with her and walked up the steps. She opened the heavy front door with her key and kept on walking and he continued beside her. "It's a walk-up," she warned.

He looked amused. "Am I invited?"

"Of course, you're always invited."

She felt a little ashamed of the stairwells and halls of her apartment house, because they looked so dingy compared to what she was sure he was used to, because they still smelled of cooking from the evening meal. He wasn't a boy of twenty-four any more, escorting a Bohemian ballet dancer home to her romantic cold-water flat. He was forty years old and he ate at Le Pavilion, and cabbage smelled like cabbage. As for her, she wasn't living here because she thought it was a lark, she lived here because it was the only thing her family could afford. An ugly image went through her mind: the poor young magazine assistant and the rich older executive. But when she unlocked the door to her apartment there was a lamp lighted softly on the end table next to the sofa and tlie only thing you could smell was the faint odor of baby talcum from the room she shared with Hillary. All the windows in tlie living room were wide open and there was the beginning of a cool night breeze. She switched on the overhead light.

"Do you want a drink?"

"I don't think so. I'm keeping you up." He was looking around. "Is that where your mother scuttles when she hears your key in the lock?"

"Yes."

He gestured toward the sofa. "And that's the scene of the many battles."

She couldn't help smiling. "Yes."

He walked over to the end table and looked at two pictures which were on it. "Who is this?"

"My father."

"And this is your littie girl. She's pretty."

"She's prettier now."

He picked up his newspapers and put them under one arm. "I'm going now. I just wanted to spy a little." He walked to the door, and Barbara followed him. At the door he stopped and looked down at her. 'Thank you for a wonderful evening."

"Thank you"

"Could you have dinner with me on Thursday?"

"Yes," she said softly.

They stood there looking at each other, he holding his armful of newspapers, she witli one hand almost reaching the knob of the door to open it. Neither of them moved. Barbara felt as if she were paralyzed.

"Look," Sidney said, "this is silly." With a swift gestmre he deposited the newspapers on a chair and put his arms around her. With one hand reaching out in back of her he switched oflF the overhead light. She could have stepped back and he would have released her but she could no more bring herself to do it than she could have hurled herself down the stairwell. When he kissed her she had an instant of detached resistance, a second when she said to herself, This is more silly . . . But then she had the oddest sensation, as if for the first time she was aware of every vein and artery in her body because warmth and blood were coursing through them, and the feeling she had fought off when every boy kissed her overpowered her and was finally welcome. She put her arms around his neck and kissed him back, recognizing her own desire as if it were a stranger because it had been such a long time, and as an old friend because it made her so happy.

He was the one who drew away first. He looked down at her affectionately and grinned, with that glint in his eye she had seen the first night she had met him. "Hell," he said, "don't worry. I don't want to neck with you. I just want to sleep with you."

He picked up his newspapers, opened the door, and was gone, blowing her a kiss. "Call you tomorrow."

She stood there in her doorway, looking after him, touching her

lips with the fingers of one hand, wondering for the first time how they had felt to someone else.

That night she fell asleep immediately and slept dreamlessly, and when her alarm went off in the morning she was not tired because she was so anxious to get to the office where Sidney might call her. The day that stretched ahead seemed pleasant, everything that was going to happen to her was going to be good. For the first time in over two years she had something to look forward to. Knowing that Sidney would call her, and that she would see him the next evening, made even the smallest most boring bits of office routine take on new dimension. She loved her job, she loved walking to work in the early morning before the sun made the streets begin to sizzle, today she loved her reflection in the plate-glass window in front of the delicatessen near her apartment house. How jaunty that girl looked, the girl Sidney Carter liked and found interesting.

He called her at three o'clock. Barbara had closed the blinds of her office against the glaring afternoon sun, and it was dim and cool in her little cubicle, shut away from the rest of the offices and their noises, with something of the drowsy and luxurious feeling of being in bed in the middle of the afternoon. When she heard his voice on the telephone it completed the feeling and she wondered why she had never before realized that tliree o'clock in the afternoon would be the best time of the entire day or night for making love.

"What are you doing?" he asked her.

"Just sitting here. I'm going to try to write some copy in a few minutes. It seemed too soon after lunch to grapple with the problems of teen-age acne."

He laughed. "I have four people waiting outside my office to see me but I wanted to talk to you first."

They were both busy, they both had responsibilities, and yet for this instant everything else was shut out. "I'm glad you called," she said.

"So am I. . . ."

''What time will I see you tomorrow?"

"Five o'clock outside your office."

She could see him there already, in her mind, and she was filled with happiness and excitement. "I have to go now," he said. "I only wanted to speak to you for a minute."

"Go and work."

"You too. . . ."

She hung up the receiver and sat for a moment motionless, remembering their conversation, not so much his w^ords as the tone in which they had been spoken. Fondness had been in it, genuine fondness. A busy man in the middle of the working day had stopped to say a few meaningless things on the telephone because he wanted to; the day stopped for a moment and went on. It was that pause that made all the rest worthwhile. Barbara had the feeling that it had meant as much to him as it had to her. It wasn't hard now to turn around on her swivel chair and pound at her typewriter. "A new powder base for teen-age problem skin . . ." Poor teen-agers, they wanted to be admired too, inferiority complexes and pimples and all—didn't everybody?

On Thursday afternoon there was a quick thunderstorm that vanished after fifteen minutes and left the streets wet and cooled with rain. Barbara came out of her office in a new red linen dress she had bought at the beginning of the summer and had never yet had the interest to wear. She had drenched herself in Wonderful perfume, half as a joke because it was one of Sidney's accounts and half because she really liked it. She had washed her hair the night before, the sky was dazzlingly blue, the afternoon was cool enough so that she would not wilt before they got into an air-conditioned bar, and her heart was pounding. When Sidney came up to her and took her arm to lead her to a taxi she had the feeling that all this had happened to the two of them not just once but many many times before.

"What a beautiful dress."

"It's new."

In the taxi he sat again facing her, but not as far away as the last time. She was so glad to see him, she felt so at ease with him. "What are you thinking?" he asked.

"I was wishing that everybody could meet for the first time on a second date, like this, and never have the mistrust and misunderstandings people often have in the begirming—the way we almost had when we first went out for cocktails, remember? And then I was thinking that if we had started off on our second date I would have missed all the fun we had together Tuesday."

"You should have said yes when I asked you last Christmas. We could have had months together."

"I know," Barbara said. "But I was different then."

"Different? How?"

She grinned at him. "Smarter, maybe."

"Busier, maybe."

"You always turn everything into a comphment."

He took her to a bar far over on the East Side where they sat in a little enclosed garden with a striped awning overhead and clean gi-ay pebbles underfoot. It had white metal chairs and small round white metal tables. Everyone there looked very Madison Avenue, three men in earnest conversation, a girl with a poodle leashed to the leg of her chair, a young couple on a date looking stiff and self-conscious. The young man wore a red-and-blue-striped tie and a seersucker suit, his blond hair was cut very short and it made his neck look like raw veal. The girl looked as if she had just come from her office, because she was not very dressed up but there was something chic and businesslike about her. She was evidently trying hard to keep up a drowning conversation.

"Look there," Barbara said. "That used to be me."

"Do you know him?"

"No. But I can tell you some things about him. He works on Madison Avenue or perhaps on Wall Street and he's been out with her before, but not frequently."

"It looks to me like a bUnd date," Sidney said, "and not a very successful one."

"No. He wouldn't take her to such an expensive place if it were a blind date. After all, he might not have liked her."

"What a formula you have!" he said, amused. "Tell me more, but first have a Martini."

He ordered drinks, and Barbara looked more closely at the couple in the corner, which was not too easy as they were far away. But the tables between were still empty because it was early. "She's doing all the talking, what little there is, but that isn't necessarily because she likes him. She looks as if she thinks it's her duty. And he evidently does too, because he isn't trying at all."